Strong opinions, weakly held

Danc has posted the notes to a presentation he gave, Why we turned Microsoft Office into a Game. It’s a great piece on the complexity of applications and how to manage it for users. In it, he gets down to the core problem that faces companies trying to build growing businesses around software — dealing with the fact that different users take advantage of different features, and that applications tend to grow more complex as their user bases grow. It seems to me that the fashionable answer to this problem is to claim to be an auteur of application development, and to only build the features that are appealing to you. But that’s not the way big software companies work, and it’s really not the way they should work. If you’re in the software business, this presentation is a must-read.